Sleeping With The Past, part 4: Vaginamony
Sleeping With The Past, part 4: Vaginamony
I Promise To Tell The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But The Truth.
Warnings: Hooboy. This one’s got some major controversy to it. There are a large number of comments critical of Christianity in general and Catholicism and evangelical Christianity in particular. Because Christianity has been critical of others, most notably LGBTQ+ folks, that gets discussed, including violence and discrimination against LGBTQ+ people. The church abuse scandals are mentioned as well.
Previous parts to the Sleeping With The Past group can be found here:
Part 1: Confessions of a Recovering Sith Lady
In some denominations of Christianity, a believer will give a Testimony - a story about their relationship with G-d. How it grew and developed and changed over time. Ostensibly, it is about how the believer grows closer to G-d over time.
This is not one of those Testimonies. In fact, since this is looking at the tattered remains of my faith, this is better referred to as an anti-Testimony. Granted, given the origin of the term - and that I have no testes remaining to give Testimony - it is perhaps doubly appropriate to reject the Testimony term.
So, without the requisite equipment for a Testimony, and going in the opposite direction of intended, I must give my Vaginamony.
Every trans person that comes from a religious background has to reconcile their faith with their identity.
For some, this is possible; it is never easy, but they find themselves in a loving home. They find themselves in a place that Gets It. These are the places that Do Their Homework and analyze the Bible for what it is, how it came to be, and what the intention and purpose of each of these parts were and are. I have found myself envying a trans friend who is a leader in her church, who belongs to a welcoming and affirming house of G-d, and wishing I could have known a church that wasn’t significantly tainted by bigotry, before that bigotry did lasting damage. I wish all people of all faiths a home where they are welcomed and celebrated, rather than shunned and condemned.
For others, it is patently impossible. Some Christian churches are not built on the teachings of Christ, but on the sins of humanity; they use Scripture more like siding on a house, attempting to give a veneer of Christ to the worst of greed, hatred, bigotry, and heartlessness - basically attempting to turn the Seven Deadly Sins of its adherents into virtue rather than vice. Lust for power and control of people, of governments, of the world; greed for material things of this earth, for the earth itself, and gluttony for its bounty; envy for those outside of their church who understand G-d’s love, and wrath against their joy; sloth in their continued obstinate ignorance in the face of the truth; and foolish pride in all of it. More specifically, some religions and denominations have explicitly attacked the very notion that someone could be trans, casting aside massive and critical portions of scripture, as well as massive and critical research as to our validity and existence. By rejecting this evidence, this truth, they choose to ultimately wallow in their anti-Christ Christianity. In such an environment, a trans person is given a choice: reject their identity, or reject the church and community.
About all I can say for me is… I tried remaining Catholic. I really tried.
In The Beginning…
I was born into an old-fashioned Catholic family. I was baptized Catholic, as were my brother and sister, as were my parents, as were all of my cousins, as were my aunts and uncles, as were my grandparents… being Catholic was intertwined with family. One of my very first memories is of my younger sister’s baptism, with all of my relatives there to celebrate. Sundays as a child, before my family moved away, had a routine: go to Mass early in the morning (if we didn’t go on Saturday night), then either go to one of my aunt and uncle’s places to play, or they would come to ours. Even now, whenever visits occur, Sunday morning will be spent in church.
The degree to which Catholicism surrounded me in those early days: The town my parents lived in had several Christian churches; along the Main Street, there was a sign with arrows pointing different directions. One had the arrow pointing to the Catholic church, one the opposite direction to the Lutheran church, and one to the Baptist church, with the arrow pointing the same direction as the Catholic Church. The thought in my five-year-old brain: “Well, they do baptisms at my church… maybe that’s what that means!”
All of these stories show why this schism, this dichotomy of identity and faith, can be so painful. For those of us raised in a particular church, it’s not just rejecting part of belief; it’s rejecting what was once our whole world. It’s rejecting family.
Out Of The Nest
When I was eight years old, my family moved from Iowa to Texas. This meant a separation from extended family - aunts and uncles and cousins and the like were no longer physically close. Moreover, unlike Catholic-predominant Iowa, Texas was far more Protestant, in particular evangelical Protestant. This proved to be the first real test of my beliefs.
Catholicism in Texas in the 1980s was eye-opening, because of the degree to which evangelical Protestant denominations dominated the landscape. The result of this from a religious standpoint was that I was entering a very different environment, one where I was suddenly in a religious minority. My parents joined a parish so new that we didn’t even have a building; we met in the cafeteria of one of the local schools. We were a part of building and growing that parish - an amazing experience, if you ever get a chance. So it was a much younger crowd than what we were used to, and a much more dynamic environment than what we were used to. My parents were involved in the Church, teaching CCD (youth education) and RCIA (adult entry-into-the-church education), joining the Men’s and Women’s Clubs in the church, and helped out at one of the local homeless shelters.
And, yet, despite this, despite my parents showing love for others, there were people in that society who would claim my parents - and I - would be damned to Hell for not going to their church, their congregation.
I can’t help but see the parallels between then and now, even if it wasn’t as pronounced then. I developed my tools: I would question, find ways to doubt their narrative, play the devil’s advocate. I’ve since come to realize that these tools are inadequate - a closed mind resists opening, after all - but they were the only tools I knew, and they were tools I would sharpen. Usually those tools were enough to keep others at bay.
I learned. I learned from my Catholicism, studying the basics of theology and Christian philosophy. I studied the Bible more than the standard Catholic, but not as much as those who would quote Scripture at me. Like most outcasts my age, I read - a lot.
But all of this was within the confines of Catholicism. In those earlier days, I was a pro-life advocate. I viewed abortion as murder. As I have mentioned in past posts, nobody ever mentioned that abortion really is life-saving health care, nor do they mention the hardship demanded of the mother for having the child. That said, I was pro-life in the Catholic sense; I opposed euthanasia, and still oppose the death penalty. Questioning parts of Catholicism itself wasn’t something I was quite ready for - yet.
The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House, after all.
Saving My Life
Every trans person raised within Christianity will have a complicated relationship with the religion, because to what degree has Christianity hurt us, and to what degree has Christianity saved us?
As mentioned before, in late February / early March 1997, my egg cracked; I figured out I was trans. That is an existential moment. No matter what answers a trans person finds, they’re not coming out unscathed. When you have to give a radical answer to the question “Who am I?”, there’s no clue as to what the result will be.
And the first four years - almost exactly four years - after my egg cracked were trying to find an answer to that.
I prayed a lot. I prayed to not be trans. I prayed that I would be made a woman. I prayed for strength to get through this. There were also plenty of “why me?” prayers. I prayed in so many ways I’ve lost count. That’s something I don’t think transphobic Christians understand: people asking us to “pray the gay away” or to “pray harder” have zero understanding of just how hard we prayed. I guarantee you that we have prayed far more and far harder than you will ever know.
But I digress. For those four years, I expected I’d be dead soon. I knew how all of this would go. At some point, likely before I reached the age of 40, I would have to transition. Problem was, this was the 90s; the idea of insurance covering anything for transition was unheard of. I fully expected I would need to transition, would be unable to, and take the other way out.
For someone Christian in a denomination that teaches anything LGBTQ+ is a sin, figuring out you are trans comes with a lot of shame. It’s a lot of work to get through all of this, and it took a long time. And, frankly, I think it’s time to admit something that needs to be said: that shame kills. That shame is so intense that some of us feel that there is no choice in transition, that we can’t transition.
News flash for those out there: if the gender incongruence is bad enough, there is no choice in transition; we must transition.
So… what happened? How did I get out of this death spiral?
I was a decently good Catholic at an interesting time.
Was almost exactly four years after my egg cracked, in 2001. Ash Wednesday had been a business trip; I was flying out to a bakery in Philadelphia to do some measurements for equipment I would be designing. Problem was, I was rather distracted by the trip to do what a Catholic normally would - fast and abstain, go to church and receive ashes on forehead - and I was grousing about this fact to the person who picked me up, the sales rep in the area.
The sales rep’s first and middle name were Francis Xavier - more colloquially known as “Fran”. If you know anything about Catholic saints, you understand that this is an extremely Catholic name. As you could guess, he was Catholic as well.
The time there was not the usual engineering trip. Apparently bar hopping - or possibly more interesting activities - are normal for a business trip. I did neither. At the time, I didn’t drink; I figured I was messed up enough without it. That Thursday, we went to a mall and I played pinball. Friday, before heading out, we went to Nifty Fifty’s for a cheese steak, and I forgot I wasn’t supposed to eat meat, and groused a bit about that. (To this day, if I go to Philly, I go to that cheese steak place.)
So… as Fran, the sales rep, drove me to the airport, he made an interesting suggestion.
He suggested I become a priest.
Explaining my reaction in those seconds after would take some discussion. This was one of those moments where everything changes, though Fran I don’t think could tell. I turned to look out the window, to go through my thoughts.
The first thought was a cynical one: I must be a shitty engineer if he’s suggesting I become a priest!
The second thought was that there was no way; none.
But then… I actually started considering the possibility. What if? What if I could go forward, become a priest? And it’s interesting what happened at that point.
Some Christian denominations, in particular Evangelical ones, talk about being “born again”. I think I got an idea of what that’s supposed to feel like in that moment. I felt… light. It physically felt like a heavy backpack had been lifted off of me, and for the first time I could truly breathe.
Of course it wasn’t to last. The feeling lasted for about fifteen seconds before reality intruded. There was no way that the Catholic Church would let me into seminary, let alone become a priest. The Church was already reeling from the first sexual abuse scandals, and even though sexuality and gender are not tied together, the Church would not make such a distinction.
But those fifteen seconds or so showed me what I was doing to myself. By not acting to save my life, I was killing myself. From then on, I stopped being a passive observer of my own funeral, and started working to improve my life.
So religion - being Catholic - saved my life. The question remains, though, as to whether it would have needed saving in the first place. That guilt, that shame… would it have been there if I wasn’t Catholic?
For G-d and Country
That moment fueled me for the next years. Being trans in a hostile world might kill me, but I wasn’t going down easily. Within a year, I was studying for my MBA. Within five, I was in the doctoral program. Within ten, I was a professor.
And through this, I largely toed the Catholic party line. Being Catholic saved my life. So I tried to remain a good Catholic, going to church every week, maintaining the usual practices and going to holy days, etc. I remember struggling as an MBA student, having already decided I was going for my doctorate, trying to reconcile being trans - even if not transitioning - with being an instructor. One other interesting eye-opening experience from when I was an MBA student: going to study abroad in Denmark. While there, I attended church on Sundays - a small, quaint little Catholic Church in Copenhagen. I would follow along as best I could; one of the beauties of a Catholic service is that, while I may not understand the language, the service by itself is standardized enough that I could largely follow along from memory.
One thing that became apparent from that time: Religious belief and patriotic belief, at least in the US, were mixed to a far greater degree than people realized. This was a religious service outside of the US, and it was interesting how it felt when I either couldn’t see the patriotism, or couldn’t understand it. This blending of Christianity and politics was the character of the society Americans live in, and to step outside of that world was a bit of an eye-opener.
That said, I went on; time went on. I spent a year in Houston, working as an analyst; a church was within walking distance of work, and I would occasionally go to church during my lunch hour. I went into the doctoral program afterwards, and joined the local Newman Center just across the street from my grad-student-shared-with-three-others “office”. I was sort of involved with the church; I did choir for awhile, I occasionally served Eucharist. (One interesting moment: Holy Thursday services in a basement, as a tornado ripped through town.). When I graduated and became an academic, I went to work at a Catholic school; sometimes I would go to Mass on campus, sometimes to a nearby church.
That said, something else was going on. America - and American Christianity - was itself changing.
I’ve thought a lot about those eighteen years between waking up and reaching the transition point. Did American Catholicism change, or did society change? Or both? I think it was kind of both. First the Affordable Care Act; Catholics were up in arms about the abortion requirements of the ACA. Then there was the confrontation over gay marriage, which culminated in Obergefell.
In that time period, in particular between 2010 and 2015, American society had to face some things. It was forced to face its past; it had to face the damage it had done, and as organized Christianity had played an advisory role of sorts, the damage organized Christianity had done. It had to face centuries of bigoted preachers advocating the subjugation of a group of beings solely on the color of their skin. It had to face centuries of systematized sexism and misogyny and homophobia and transphobia, as well as the lives that it cost, in pogroms from the Salem Witch Trials to the AIDS epidemic. It had to face its colonialism, how Christianity was used to justify the greed and barbarism of its own members by twisting the Bible to make their victims the “barbarians”.
It was very much like an entire country going to Confession.
And some people weren’t able to do that, because to confess sins means to admit wrongdoing, either by ourselves or by our ancestors. Admit we are the monsters, we are the great Satan. Admit our monstrosities, admit our guilt.
For years, I wasn’t able to do that. I was trying to be as squeaky-clean and as unimpeachable as possible, as I genuinely feared for my job; for my being trans to become publicly known before tenure would have been a disaster. I separated myself from many of my contacts on the liberal side of the aisle at the time, not wanting my secret to go public. This isolation became reinforced after a former friend outed my old fanfic writing to colleagues, to my department chair, to my dean, to the school newspaper. And for several years after, I felt too far threatened by circumstances at the school to truly come to terms.
This is where things largely stood when my own crisis occurred in 2019, which led to me transitioning.
The Break-Up
My faith really wasn’t affected during the early years of my transition, when I was still in the closet, though it had its wrinkles. Some portion of this time was spent in quarantine, which meant watching church services from the comfort of home. One of my favorite Christmas masses occurred in 2020, watching from my parents’ kitchen table; we could make all of the comments we wanted during the homily, all of the sidebars that we’d always wanted to but couldn’t in the chapel itself, and it became this beautiful, sharing moment.
This would all change in 2022, as my transition became public.
After my public transition, I tried to be a good Catholic. I tried going to Mass regularly. I wanted to be the trans woman in church, the one that some hurting trans kid might see and take hope in, that there was a possible route of faith forward as a trans person in the Church. And I really did try. I didn’t want to give up on my faith, I didn’t want to give up on something that I saw as saving my life.
But, well, something had changed. Like I said, an entire country had gone to Confession. And some people, rather than focus on Christ’s love and care for others, instead focused on whatever outdated Scriptures reinforced their bigotries, reinforced their hatreds, reinforced their indifference, reinforced their sins.
People were doubling down on their bigotries. People who’d been so wrapped up in whatever the conservative media had told them that they refused to examine, even from a logical perspective, the positions and actions they’d entered into. In some churches it was an obvious thing; in others, less so.
What I noticed in the Catholic Church - especially those in the Southern US - was an attempt to go old-school. Bringing back the rosary. Saying that sanctimonious Prayer to St. Michael in every Mass, even while flaunting its words. The prayer was re-introduced to masses around 2018 or so, ostensibly as a guard against sexual abuse by priests.
Seriously, Catholics. Lust isn’t the only “wickedness and snare of the devil” in your heart you need to guard against.
Going to church was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. Whenever I’d go to church, I couldn’t help but wonder who in that congregation would gladly see me dead. That mix of politics and religion was becoming more and more apparent. Nothing quite like living in a world where people are starving and in need, where Ukraine and the Middle East are ravaged by war, and the most pressing threat the priest decides to rail against is gay marriage.
Unfortunately, that rot, that bigoted myopia, went all the way up. My parents go to church in Texas; while they were officially in the Diocese of Dallas, they were close enough to the Diocese of Tyler that it had an effect. The Bishop of the Diocese of Tyler was so conservative that even Pope Francis had had enough and dismissed him from the post. Not that Pope Francis was much better; he once compared being trans to nuclear war, and used - twice! - a derogatory slur for gay male sex in meetings.
The more the Church went old school and doubled down on outdated rules, the more they mocked Christ’s love, the more they pushed me - and no doubt others like me - away. I thought about finding another home for awhile. I went to an Episcopal church once or twice. I attended a Reform Judaism synagogue several times, and probably would have stayed if my experiences with Catholicism hadn’t soured me on religion in general. But overall, I was seeing that, at that point in time, any church would do more harm than good for me.
When I was much younger, I read Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Impressionable me fell in love with Alyosha as a template for life: a monk without a monastery, a brother who helped his family out, a person who stuck to his principles even in the face of opposition.
Sometimes the monk has to leave the monastery if she is truly to find G-d.
The End
My Catholic faith died a quiet death along the Erie Canal a couple of months ago.
I was engaged in one of my favorite pastimes, riding along the Canal on my bicycle. When I ride, I will generally have one earbud in; that way, I can listen to music or an audiobook or a podcast while still keeping awareness of my surroundings.
The audiobook for this day: Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender? The first few chapters of Butler’s book go into detail on the various international organizations arrayed and connected together to combat a scientific understanding of gender - and, by extension, the existence of trans people. Among these are several Catholic organizations, blessed and supported by the Holy See. And as I pedaled along the canal, the depths to which Christian organizations, including Catholic organizations, arrayed and allied against trans people, advocating for care bans and even persecution, was laid bare.
That, I think, was the end. It was one thing to evangelize against my existence. It was another level entirely to take steps to advocate and act against my existence. When you realize that significant portions of your religion really do want you dead, how do you react to that? How do you reconcile this bile and hate spewed from the mouthpiece of G-d?
The answer is that you don’t. Or, at least, I didn’t. There comes a point where you realize that being a part of that environment at best isn’t healthy, and at worst delves into the abusive. I recognized that it was actively abusive, and walked away.
I am an ex-Catholic. Almost certainly ex-Christian, and quite possibly ex-religious. I’ll probably go to church when visiting family, but that’s it. I’m done. I’ve thought about joining some other, more welcoming church - I gave serious thought to joining the synagogue I mentioned earlier - but there’s just been too much damage from religion in general.
That’s not to say that I didn’t take anything away from being Catholic. It’s impossible to believe in something for decades and not take something away from it. I still think loving one another, looking out for your fellow beings, and taking care of each other is a good thing - and that is, in theory, at the heart of Christian practice. I listened to those lessons, took them to heart.
But some Christians - too many Christians - didn’t, and don’t. There’s this hole of ignorance and bigotry at the heart of many Christian churches, and the light of day is shining a beacon on that hypocrisy as young people leave the church in droves.
They see - we see - just how far these churches have fallen from Christ’s path.
And so, to conclude this Vaginamony, I have this message. I give this message to every trans person who finds themselves in a religion that refuses their existence, that would gladly see them gone.
Your faith is not your religion is not your church. Treat your relationship with your church the way you would treat your relationship with your family, or with your spouse. Remain if you can, but if it becomes abusive, get the hell out.
And if you’re Christian, you don’t have to belong to organized Christianity - you don’t have to belong to any church - to follow Christ.
Just love one another, and live according to that love.
That’s all.
Sorry this one took so long. Other writing, and a complex subject, meant this one was taking awhile.
I can see a couple more essays coming up. One is the aforementioned conversation-with-self - though I may do that in just a letter form. The other is going to be about the past, but it’s not going to be about my past, but the heritage and history of the LGBTQ+ community. A couple of days ago, another attendee at the trans meetup asked what the pink triangle on my jacket meant. What followed was a discussion on the symbol, its origin, history, and meaning. I’m realizing I’m going to need to make a post about LGBTQ+ history in general. Beyond that, I’m kind of wanting to start talking about some media that was important to me through my journey, anything from movies and television shows to music, so I may do a post on that.